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Saturday, October 12, 2013

This week in birds - #86

A roundup of the week's news of birds and the environment:

Photo by David Wiedenfeld, courtesy of ABC.

The American Bird Conservancy's Bird of the Week this week is the Rufous-headed Chachalaca. One look at its image will show you how it got its name.

This chicken-like bird is a resident of a shrinking range along the Pacific Coast of Peru, Ecuador, and Colombia. They live in small and raucous flocks of four to ten birds. The main threat to their continued existence is hunting pressure. The local people consider them a good food source. They are also threatened by the ever-encroaching clearing of land for agriculture in the area.

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It's springtime in Antarctica, a time when scientists hurry to take advantage of the marginally more pleasant weather to do important research, but because of the shutdown of the government, it looks like American scientists will not be joining the scientific community there in time for the big spring research push. In fact, there are fears that the entire year's research season may have to be cancelled.

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In another potentially disastrous effect of the shutdown, the ability of the National Weather Service, a program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, to track and forecast the weather and warn of coming storms will be severely compromised the longer the debacle continues.

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You may be familiar with birding "Big Years," in which a birder tries to see and list as many birds as he can in a year's time. Did you know that avid fans of butterflies also do Big Years? A man in New Jersey has just recorded his 101st species of butterfly for the year in that state.

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New Caledonian Crows are fascinating and very intelligent birds. It has long been known that they use tools to get food, but it turns out that they select an appropriate tool and orient it correctly to extract the food. No guesswork involved.

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The emerald ash borer, an insect that is devastating to ash trees, has apparently invaded Colorado. Although the ash is not a native tree there, it is widely used in both public and private landscapes.

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Why on earth would a bird need two tails? Well, perhaps for display or perhaps the second tail aided in flying in some way. At least that is the speculation of some scientists about the discovery of a fossil of a dinosaur-era bird from the Cretaceous Period that did, in fact, sport two tails.

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Many purveyors of "news," such as Fox News, have reported that global warming has slowed down, that it has "paused." This story continues to be repeated by less than rigorous journalists. It is wholly false. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change recently issued its report which makes that abundantly clear and the projections for the future become more dire every year that we fail to do anything to reverse the trend. So far, projections by the Panel have been right on track. Unfortunately.

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Research has shown that many songbirds search for sources of food in the morning but do their main feeding near the end of the day. This is a strategy that helps them to avoid hawks which typically hunt earlier in the day. I have actually observed this in my own yard. Many birds wait until the late afternoon to visit the feeders.

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"Dead as a Dodo" is a catchphrase for something that is thoroughly, irrevocably dead. It refers to the large flightless pigeon that went extinct in the 17th century because it had no defenses against hungry humans. But a researcher has discovered that the bird may actually have survived several decades longer than had previously been believed. Doesn't really change anything though. It is still dead as a Dodo.

Bumblebees are among my favorite backyard critters, and they have a very interesting life cycle. The blogger at "Native Plants and Wildlife Gardens" writes about that cycle this week.

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Swifts are prodigious fliers, but this boggles the imagination. Three Alpine Swifts in southwest Africa apparently flew continuously for 200 days. They ate, slept, did everything that a swift's life requires on the wing.

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Around the backyard:

And speaking of swifts, it has been several days since I have seen or heard any Chimney Swifts over my backyard. I'm thinking they have headed south. In some years, they have hung around until about the first of November, but evidently not this year.

The White-winged Doves have abandoned my yard. I'm not exactly crying about that, but it's interesting how this works. Periodically, they will completely disappear from the yard for weeks at a time. This often happens in autumn, but they will be back in force once winter comes. I still see one or two occasionally flying over the yard, but they don't stop to feed any more.

Most of the Ruby-throated Hummingbirds have moved on now. The cold front that we got last weekend seemed to hurry them along. There are still some passing through every day or so, all adult females or juveniles. I haven't seen any adult males for a while. But the ones that I see now are strictly "here today, gone tomorrow." Now my backyard is controlled by two Rufous Hummingbirds. Are they the same ones that have spent the last two winters here? I've no way of knowing, but they seem to be here to stay.

Suddenly, my yard is completely overrun during the middle of the day by House Sparrows. There must be a hundred or more of the birds that ravage my birdseed and sit in the shrubs and chatter noisily all day long. They finally disappear in the late afternoon, headed to a nighttime roost somewhere. I always have some sparrows in my yard, but this amounts to a plague. I need to find some way to discourage them.

I hope that you are not being "plagued" and that all of your birding experiences are happy ones.